PTSD – Philosophy for lifehttp://www.philosophyforlife.org
The website of Jules EvansFri, 11 Aug 2017 11:29:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1Nancy Sherman, the soldiers’ philosopherhttp://www.philosophyforlife.org/nancy-sherman-the-soldiers-philosopher/
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/nancy-sherman-the-soldiers-philosopher/#commentsSat, 27 Sep 2014 09:51:25 +0000http://www.philosophyforlife.org/?p=5447Professor Nancy Sherman has worked with the US military for over 20 years, and has written several books on military ethics, including Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind; and The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers. How did you come to teach philosophy in the military? Through […]

Through a crisis on their part. The US Naval Academy had a cheating scandal. Back, in the 1990s, 130 electrical engineering midshipmen were implicated in cheating on a major exam. They seemed to have got it in advance. These individuals were all brought before various kinds of honour boards, and as part of the ‘moral remediation’ they wanted an ethicist onboard. That was me. After two weeks they asked me to set up an ethics course. One thing led to another, and eventually I was selected as the inaugural distinguished chair of ethics at the Naval Academy.

How did you find teaching in the military?

My dad was a WWII vet, didn’t talk about it much. I was a child of the 60s, many of my friends were conscientious objectors. Now, I was in a place where there were marines and officers who had fought on the Mekong Delta. It was an eye-opener, to see the other side of a conflict that was very formative for me. I hadn’t really met my peers who had served. I learned a lot from them.

The Naval Academy is a different sort of university. It’s uniformed. Everyone is Ma’aming and Sir-ing. They’re trying to figure out what rank you are. They were used to a very hierarchical universe. And a lot of Navy people are engineer-focused. They want bottom lines. Discussions without clear endings, or deliberative questions without easy right and wrongs, shades of grey, all of that was not something they were comfortable with.

But you discovered they have a natural interest in Stoic philosophy.

Yes. The course took them through deliberative models and major ethical theories – Aristotle, emotions, deliberation and habits; Kant and universalizability; Mill and Bentham, and notions of maximizing utility. When we got to Stoicism – Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius – they felt ‘this is the stuff I know: suck it up, truck on, externals mean nothing to me. I can’t get back for my wedding because I’m on a ship, well, it’s beyond my control.’

One of the greatest officers in their midst was Admiral James Bond Stockdale. He’d endured seven years in the Hanoi Hilton [the north Vietnamese prison], two of them in leg-irons. He’d been given a little copy of Epictetus when studying at Stanford. He committed it to memory and it became his salvation. That’s a well-known story in the military.

You met and interviewed Stockdale several times. What was he like?

He had a kind of James Cagney voice. And you couldn’t tell when it was him talking or when he was quoting Epictetus. It was seamless. You sometimes thought you’re in front of an impersonator. He had a noticeable limp in his left leg, from when his plane crashed in Vietnam, and Epictetus also had a limp in his left leg. So there was a physical kinship and perhaps a spiritual kinship too.

Are the Stoics widely read in the US military? I came across quite a few Stoic soldiers when researching my book, particularly in the Green Berets – I didn’t come across any in the British military.

The Roman Stoics are read by officers and commanders, not so much by enlisted men. How they come to it is an interesting question. I think in the Marines and Navy, probably through Stockdale’s influence on the curriculum – he was head of the Naval War College on Rhode Island. Also these are popular writers, easy to read. Everyone understands stoic with a little s.

How useful or appropriate is Stoicism for soldiers?

It has curses and blessings. It fits an idealized model of invincibility, of external goods not mattering. I can expand the perimeter of my agency so that the only thing that matters is what I can control – namely my virtue. It meshes with what we know to be pretty natural responses to constant threat. As Stockdale once put it, you’re ‘as cagey a Stoic as you can be’. He was a cagey sage with his captors – this won’t touch me, this won’t affect me.

With that goes the notion that your emotions can be fully controlled and you can turn them off, essentially. Anything your emotions attach to in sticky and graspy ways is dangerous, because they can destabilize you, they can make you mourn and grieve. So there’s the idea of not missing something – a cigarette, your child, your spouse, or your buddy who gets blown up next to you. It’s useful armour. That’s the blessing.

The curse is it can be a way of not feeling, or as a lot of soldiers tell me, you feel ‘dead to the world’ – they can’t feel anymore. And that’s awful. You come home and you have this gorgeous child, and a family you want to adore, and you can’t even feel joy because you’ve turned off your emotions in certain ways. That is an absolute curse.

The Stoics were giving salvation for tough times. It’s a great philosophy for tough times, I’m not sure it’s a great philosophy for everyday living. It’s always good to feel more in control, but it’s not good to think that luck and the vicissitudes of the world can’t touch you or that you can’t show moral outrage, love, grief, and so on.

Do some soldiers manage to put on and take off that Stoic armour?

No, that’s really hard. This is a question about ‘resilience’ – the million-dollar-word in the military right now. The idea of resilience is you can bounce back. We have 2.4 million soldiers coming home from war. They can’t bounce back on their own. They can’t bounce back just with their families. They need a community that gets it. They need to know that we’re not just saying ‘thank you for your service’. They need enormous amounts of trust, hope, medical attention. Above all they need emotional connection.

There’s an idea in Stoicism that your loyalty to the Logos, to the ‘City of God’, comes before your loyalty to the state. The Stoics were quite individualistic, probably not great team-players. How does that fit in with the very strong collective or conformist ethos of the military? What if you’re asked to do something that doesn’t fit with your virtue?

The best service-member will never check their conscience at the door. It will be with them all the time. That’s not just Stoic. That’s any moral philosophy – you do the right thing. Your virtue is your guide. If you have an officer, a commander, who is giving you unlawful, immoral, bad advice, and it’s even part of a system – of torture for example – the moral individual will question that, whatever philosophy they have.

Major Ian Fishback

One of my friends is Ian Fishback, he now teaches at Westpoint and is going to do a Phd in philosophy at Michigan. He’s a special forces major. He served eight years or so in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was at Abu Ghraib and didn’t like what he saw there. He wrote at least 50 letters to command about what was going on. He got no answers. He finally wrote to Senator John McCain, who’d been a POW with Jim Stockdale, and said ‘this is what I’m seeing’. He went public. He blew the whistle. And from that came a referendum that was put before congress. To know Ian is to know that he is thoughtful. He is conscientious.

To be in the military is hard for the thinking soldier. All the people I work closely with, all my PhD students from the military – they have to accept some of the absurd of a career in the military, but you can’t accept some of the missions. You pick your battles. And it may be a career-ender. You face the possibility that you’re not going to be a yes-man.

How well is the military coping with PTSD at the moment? How big a problem is it?

We don’t really know the numbers, but some say there’s maybe 30% incidence of PTSD in soldiers coming home. It’s a central issue which the Americans are taking on in various ways. The Pentagon, and in particular General Peter Chiarelli, wants to drop the D from PTSD. They argue it’s not a disorder, it’s an injury with an external cause. They want to destigmatize it.

Secondly, there’s vast efforts to deal with the suicide peak – for the first time in record-keeping, the rate of suicide in the military exceeds the comparable rate for young male civilians. It’s not always after multiple deployments. Often the precipitating factors have to do with coming home, with difficult family relationships at home. It’s very complex. Some would like to find a ‘biomarker’ for suicidal tendencies.

There aren’t enough mental health workers, that’s pretty clear. And there’s still stigma, still a sense that it’s weak not to be able to handle losing your buddy.

Also, traumatic stress has a moral dimension, often. It’s not just a fear symptom. It’s also that you keep going back to the situation and thinking ‘I should have done that, I wasn’t good enough, I let someone down’. It’s complicated what morality is in the complex of war. You’re in a lethality and violence-soaked environment, increasingly in population-centric environments. There’s a lot of grey area – who’s the enemy, are they a voluntary or involuntary human-shield, and so on.

I read the military isn’t doing a great job at keeping track of what treatments for PTSD actually work.

Well, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy seems to be the leader. But you’re talking about populations that are heavily medicated, on sleeping pills, on anxiety pills, on pain-killers. And that affects their ability to change their thinking.

What do you think of Martin Seligman’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme [ a $180 million programme introduced in 2010 to teach resilient-thinking skills to all service-members, to try and prevent PTSD occurrence]?

This was introduced in 2009 / 2010 when the suicide rate was going up. They needed something fast. As one army psychiatrist said to me, they expected broken bodies, they didn’t expect broken minds. I think Seligman’s work has been shown to be effective in populations of children in tough neighbourhoods. He had not done previous work with combat lethality-saturated environments.

Emotional intelligence is a great thing, being able to talk about things soldiers don’t typically talk about is great. You need forums, you need lots of time. My understanding is you get two hours training twice a year when you’re not deployed. That’s not a lot.

Some military psychiatrists worry that the programme could further stigmatize those who still develop PTSD. If you’ve gone through the preventative programme and you still can’t sleep at night, you’re still racked by guilt, you may feel even worse. Prevention is one thing, but you can’t further stigmatize those who are traumatized. Still, I applaud the armed forces for realizing that mental health is critical for soldiers’ health.

You still work with soldiers now?

I have a lot of veterans enrolled in my classes in Georgetown. I’ve been working with soldiers for 20 years now. They’re my buddies. Next year I have a book coming out about soldiers coming home, called Making Peace with War: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers, which involved a lot of long interviews with soldiers. My heart goes out to folks who are trying to morally process really complicated issues.

To go back to the beginning, you initially started work with the military because of an ethical crisis, which they thought could be solved with an ethics course. Do you think ethics courses really do improve people’s ethical behaviour?

I think these courses have enormous value. Not when they have sets of right or wrong answers, but when you have small enough groups where you can have discussions. Finding time to think, when you’re not on the spot, is really powerful. It goes into the unconscious and is part of your reserves for hard times.

]]>http://www.philosophyforlife.org/nancy-sherman-the-soldiers-philosopher/feed/6The great PTSD conundrumhttp://www.philosophyforlife.org/the-great-ptsd-conundrum/
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/the-great-ptsd-conundrum/#commentsFri, 19 Jul 2013 14:00:40 +0000http://www.philosophyforlife.org/?p=4111Why do 20% of American soldiers develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and only 3-5% of British soldiers? It’s one of the great conundrums of contemporary psychology / psychiatry – and one of the most contentious, touching as it does on sensitive issues of our countries’ moral characters, and how well our governments care for their […]

Why do 20% of American soldiers develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and only 3-5% of British soldiers? It’s one of the great conundrums of contemporary psychology / psychiatry – and one of the most contentious, touching as it does on sensitive issues of our countries’ moral characters, and how well our governments care for their soldiers.

Dan Collins, who took his life in 2012 – a year in which the number of suicides among serving soldiers quintupled compared to 2010

The question was revisited this week by a moving Panorama documentary called Broken by Battle, made by Sunday Times journalist Toby Harnden, who won the 2012 Orwell Prize for his book Dead Men Risen, about his time with the Welsh Guards in Afghanistan. The programme traced a sharp rise in the number of suicides among troops who served in Afghanistan, and suggested the Ministry of Defence is not doing enough to help soldiers coming home with PTSD.

Toby tells me:

While I was in Helmand, I’d see instances of ‘battle shock’, where soldiers would freeze in battle, curl up into the foetal position, and be helicoptered away. I’d wonder what would happen to them. I’d heard a bit about PTSD, but I wondered if it was real or some slightly nebulous condition like Gulf War Syndrome. But out in Helmand I got to know staff sergeant Dan Collins, who developed PTSD and subsequently killed himself.

The Panorama programme explores how Dan was sectioned in an NHS mental care facility, and what a blow that was to his pride as a brave soldier (the Army used to have its own psychiatric facility but closed it). We are then shown Dan’s last words, recorded on his phone when he had left his wife and retreated to the hills, self-exiled from human society. We see him, desperately alone, wearing his military kit and the bandana he wore in Afghanistan. He apologises to his mum for being ‘a bit selfish’ in killing himself, and asks for a full military funeral. We’re told that, shortly afterwards, he hung himself from a tree.

Toby says:

After writing Dead Men Risen, I moved to the US, and saw the staggering statistics of PTSD and veteran suicide in the US armed forces. They had clearly identified a huge problem there, while in the UK armed forces, the attitude seemed to be ‘nothing to see here’.

So why the dramatic difference in PTSD rates among US and UK veterans? This is where it gets controversial. UK military psychiatrists like Simon Wessely, director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, suggests it’s because the British army is older, has more officers and fewer reservists, and shorter tours of duty – all of which implies that if the US did things differently, it would have a much lower level of PTSD among its veterans. US military psychiatrists bristle at such suggestions, and point out that US soldiers were in much heavier fighting in Iraq – only 32% of UK soldiers reported coming under small arms fire, compared with more than 90% of US soldiers.

US psychiatrists also suggest that cultural differences play a role, and that the British ‘stiff upper lip’ means that (in the words of a New Yorker blog) British veterans are ‘less likely to be told they have PTSD. They are more likely, in turn, to end up abusing alcohol or to be given the less controversial diagnosis of clinical depression, according to William Nash, a retired U.S. Navy psychiatrist and co-editor of an influential cross-cultural anthology on PTSD, ‘Combat Stress Injury: Theory, Research and Management.’

Harnden’s view, meanwhile, is that the Ministry of Defence wants to limit its financial liability for PTSD, so it is deliberately underplaying the scale of the problem. His documentary explored how the MoD don’t keep track of PTSD levels among discharged soldiers, nor of suicide statistics once soldiers have left the Army (although a report will be published on that next year). He also showed how veterans often fall between the cracks of the MoD and the NHS. We have a minister for veterans, Mark Francois, but apparently he doesn’t have responsibility for veterans’ healthcare (so what does he do?). The US has a Department for Veterans and the Pentagon spends a huge amount trialling new therapies for PTSD, both in treatment and in prevention.

Simon Wessely of KCL says the Panorama programme was one-sided

Harnden also points out that the Kings Centre for Military Health, our main source for PTSD incidence in British soldiers and veterans, is mainly funded by the MoD. The head of that Centre, Simon Wessely, retorts that the Panorama programme was one-sided in its exploration of the issue, and that its ‘shock horror’ statistic that more veterans committed suicide last year than were killed in Helmand is sensationalist rather than statistically meaningful. Simon also suggests that the reason PTSD incidence appears to be going up in UK troops could be because stigma about it is slowly being reduced – which is a good thing.

Both, ultimately, want to help British soldiers, and if PTSD is rising among our troops, that may be because of the intense fighting in Afghanistan in the last few years. So how could the MoD do more for our soldiers and veterans? The families of soldiers who committed suicide have drawn up a petition, which has seven demands:

1) Medical notes should be automatically passed onto GPs after a soldier is discharged. (This is to try to get the MoD and NHS to link up better).

2) The Army should carry out mandatory welfare checks on soldiers every six months after being discharged as per the recommendations of the ‘Fighting Fit’ mental health policy paper drawn up by Dr Andrew Murrison MP.

3) There should be residential units to treat all serving soldiers and veterans suffering with PTSD.

4) Serving soldiers should be able to access NHS services.

5) To reduce waiting lists for veterans seeking help for mental health related issues. Waiting lists are currently too long and it should not be left to charities to deal with this problem.

6) Soldiers should be able to ask for help with mental health issues without it going on their permanent Army records.

7) Soldiers’ families should be informed about the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) and other mental health related illnesses.

If there is still a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the British military, then I’d suggest that the military (and all of us) need to broaden our conception of male strength, to incorporate the Stoic idea that being strong means knowing how to take care of yourself, rather than taking out your problems on yourself and those around you. That definition of ‘Stoic’ is not the same as denying or bottling up your feelings, which is how some people misinterpret stoicism.

Personally, I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was 20, and I bottled it up for years out of a sense of shame at my weakness and foolishness (there was nothing heroic about my wound – I’d done too many drugs). Funnily enough, one of the things that helped me come to terms with my woundedness was a book about shell-shock by my great-grandfather, Lord Moran, called Anatomy of Courage.

My great-grandad, who served as a doctor in the Somme trenches

My great-grandfather was a doctor serving in the trenches during the Somme. I was particularly touched by one passage where he admitted his own fear and woundedness. He wrote of how, during the Somme, the man next to him was obliterated by a German shell: “I had a feeling as if I was physically hurt though I was not touched, the will to do the right thing was for a moment stunned…The war had never been the same since, something in the will had snapped…At the time I do not think I was much frightened, I was too stunned to think. But it took its toll later. I was to go through it many times in my sleep…Even when the war had begun to fade out of men’s minds I used to hear all at once the sound of a shell coming.”

My great-grandad went on to do great things – he was Churchill’s doctor during the War – but what touched me was that brave moment of vulnerability and candour in his writing. Even though there is a vast difference between him getting shell-shock in the trenches, and me traumatizing myself with LSD, it still seemed to give me a sort of permission to be wounded.

*******

In other news:

Talking of the stiff upper lip, this excellent short essay by GK Chesterton argues that the stiff upper lip was invented by decadent aristocrats in the Edwardian era and that actually manly Brits are fine with sobbing like babies.

Finally, the LA Review of Books reviews an interesting-sounding book by Dutch philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, arguing for a spirituality based on the idea of practice, with the goal of saving humanity from itself. Interesting – although the Nietzchean / Foucaultian idea of spirituality as care of the self, which Sloterdijk draws on, is highly individualistic and ignores the idea of religion as relational – as a relationship not just with your self but with your community and God. It also, perhaps, ignores ecstatic experience and the idea of people feeling a connection with God.

However, the title of the book, You Must Change Your Life, hints at the idea of hearing a divine voice – it comes from a brilliant poem by Rilke, where he stands in front of a headless statue of Apollo, god of prophecy (on the right), and seems to hear a voice telling him ‘you must change your life’. Is that his own projection, or the God speaking to him from the ruins of antiquity? Here’s the poem, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ in translation:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

]]>http://www.philosophyforlife.org/the-great-ptsd-conundrum/feed/1An encounter with the Mountain Kinghttp://www.philosophyforlife.org/in-the-thrall-of-the-the-mountain-king/
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/in-the-thrall-of-the-the-mountain-king/#commentsFri, 09 Nov 2012 15:45:20 +0000http://www.philosophyforlife.org/?p=2909Right at the end of my book, I talk about a strange experience I had on a mountain in Norway a decade ago. It was, you might say, a religious or mystical experience. I tucked it away at the end of the book for a very important reason: I wrote the book for theists and […]

Right at the end of my book, I talk about a strange experience I had on a mountain in Norway a decade ago. It was, you might say, a religious or mystical experience. I tucked it away at the end of the book for a very important reason: I wrote the book for theists and atheists, and I didn’t want to put off any atheists (at least, not until the very end). Ancient Greek and Roman philosophies are a meeting ground for theists and atheists, a common drinking-spot in an acrimonious time, so I was tempted to leave my own God-thoughts right out of it. In addition, I wasn’t sure whether to talk about such a private experience, and risk commodifying it. It fact, I only put the account into a very late draft, when my publisher said the book was too short…and I was still in two minds whether to do it.

When I was promoting the book in Holland last week, some interviewers asked me about that moment as their very first question, which showed at least that they’d read the whole book. So, today, I’m going to talk briefly about what happened, and explain why I still haven’t joined a religion, why I remain ‘spiritual but not religious’, and why I think science is the friend of God and not the enemy.

Back in 2001, I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for roughly five years. It was caused by a couple of LSD bad trips when I was a teenager, which left me scarred, withdrawn, socially anxious and uncertain of reality. For five years, I became more and more lost and paranoid, a stranger to myself. Then, in February 2001, my family travelled to Norway, to the Peer Gynt region, where my great-great grandfather built a hytte. We share it with the extended family, and my family usually goes there once a winter, mainly for the cross-country skiing. Here is a photo of our hytte:

This year, we decided to do some downhill skiing on the first day. We also, for some stupid reason, decided to go down the black slope first. Oh fateful choice! It was snowing up there at the top of Valsfjel, visibility was poor. There was an ill wind from the north. The owls were restless in the trees. We set off down the slope, down the particularly steep slope at the beginning and….I smashed through a fence on the side of the slope and fell…

thump.

I fell 30 feet or so, broke my left femur, broke two vertebrae in my back, and knocked myself unconscious. Then, I’m not sure if it was while I was unconscious or after I had woken up, this happened: I saw a bright white light, something like this:

….and felt completely filled with love, and a knowledge or gnosis that there was something in me and all of us that cannot be broken, that cannot die. Everything was OK.

I realised where I was and what had happened, and I immediately tried to wiggle the toes on my left foot, to see if I was paralysed. I could wiggle them. So I also knew that the worst that had happened was I’d broken my leg, and that, on a more terrestrial level, everything was OK. It was funny how calm and detached my mind was as it checked out the injury – I think that often happens in a bad accident, before the shock kicks in.

My uncle skied up and I heard him say ‘Oh God’. I tried to tell him that it was fine, that I’d had a remarkable experience, a peak experience (or should that be ‘off-peak’) but the words came out as gobbledy-gook, either because I was speaking in tongues, or I’d knocked myself silly. Then a motor-sledge came towing a stretcher, I was taken down to a hut at the bottom of the mountain, and put on a table while they staunched the bleeding. My father came in to the hut at that point. Here’s a picture of my father:

My father and I had not had a great relationship for the years immediately preceding the accident, because I was so uptight, anxious, and defensive towards the world, particularly the world of work. And, to a large extent, my father represented the world of work to me – the world of the office, the city, the career. My failure in that area of life (I was a business journalist, struggling with social anxiety, and very bad at getting on with co-workers and banker-contacts) felt to me like I was failing my father, who was very good at his city job and very charming with everyone he met. So I was quite defensive around him, which came across as hostility. It didn’t help that my father endlessly offered me advice on how to do things better, from clothing to shaving to even opening a tin of beans, which made me feel a Grade A Dufus. So, we had a somewhat strained and antagonistic relationship at that point.

Well, it was a strangely beautiful moment when he came into that shed – beautiful for me anyway, probably fairly horrifying for him. All that antagonism left, and I was simply his son, who had hurt himself. We’ve had a great relationship pretty much since then (we had a great relationship when I was growing up too, there was just four years in the middle which were a bit tricky…he had no idea I was internally miserable from drug-related trauma. None of my family or friends did. I was a master at hiding my feelings).

So, back to the story. A helicopter came and carried me away. I was taken to Lillehammer hospital, and went straight under the knife. I still have the metal pole in my leg that the surgeon put in that day. I spent a week in Lillehammer hospital, my father visiting me every day. I was very weak and whacked out. I remember I read Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, but to this day I can’t remember a single detail of the plot. Anyway, I felt fantastic – not physically, but spiritually. I felt like the crash had re-connected me to myself, to my heart and soul. For five years, I had felt completely detached from my feelings, or at least, from any good feelings. I hadn’t been able to love, or to relate to other people – all those pro-social feelings had been frazzled by the trauma. And now, for some reason, they came flooding back. I went from paranoia to eunoia. My inner Furies were transformed into the Eumenides. It was like spring after a long winter.

Of course the euphoria died away. But I retained an insight into my condition. I realised what caused my five years of suffering was not necessarily a drug-induced chemical imbalance in my brain, as I had feared. There was nothing permanently wrong with me. In fact, even if the drugs had triggered my trauma, what sustained it was my attitudes – specifically, my fear of others’ judgement of me, my fear of being labeled a failure or outcast. I looked to others’ judgements for self-validation, and this raised other people above me like a God, and made me permanently anxious and afraid of what that God might say. It also created a feedback loop between my idea of self and the reactions of other people. My defensive expectations became a self-fulfilling prophecy, like this: (I have spared no expense with this graph…)

And I realised, on that mountain, that I didn’t need to look to other people’s approval for self-worth. It seemed to me, in that moment, that we all have an immortal and invaluable soul within us, worth far more than any fleeting public approval. It’s always there, it never deserts us, its value does not rise or fall with the approval or disapproval of the world. The Gospel of St Thomas says: ‘The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure in his field without knowing it.’ Rumi said: ‘Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?’ Experiencing that directly, and trusting in it, I could relax, and not see others as judges or executioners, but simply as fellow humans, as brothers and sisters.

When I relaxed and accepted myself, many of my ‘demons’ calmed down and became friends. By demons I mean parts of ourselves that we can’t accept, that we push away and demonize because they don’t fit our public image. If we learn to accept them, they become allies and give us strength – the Furies become Eumenides. But sometimes we have to let go of our false public images and stop trying to live up to worldly expectations, to accept and placate the demonic bits of the psyche (getting a bit mystical here, forgive me!)

Alas, even that insight faded after a while. I went back to work, hobbling on crutches, and before long I was depressed and anxious again ( I was in a job I disliked, after all). The bad old mental habits came back. And that’s when I discovered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and recognised that it fit the insights I had gained on the mountain. I realised the connection between CBT and Greek philosophy, and the Greeks’ idea of trusting in the God within. CBT gave me a systematic way to change my habitual beliefs and actions – that’s what I needed.

Why, you ask, did I not become a Christian after that experience?

Peer Gynt meeting the Mountain King

Well…I’m still not sure what happened on that mountain. It could have been my unconscious, engineering a situation in which I could be wounded and could go through the healing process I had denied myself. It could have been God…but which god? My own guardian-daemon? Some local mountain spirit? In fact, the mountain I injured myself on, Valsfjel, is famous in Norwegian mythology for being the home of the Mountain King in the myth of Peer Gynt. Peer knocks his head on a rock, goes to see the Mountain King, and learns the essence of the Troll way: “Be true to yourself and to hell with the world.'” Perhaps the Mountain King helped me!

To be honest, I do believe I was helped by something outside of me, and I do think there are benevolent non-human forces in the multiverse that sometimes help us when we need help. But alas, they don’t appear to be all-powerful. The universe is a messy, chaotic and imperfect place, closer perhaps to the Olympian universe than the monotheistic one, and in that universe people can suffer terribly, and unfairly. But I believe, as the Stoics did, that there is a higher law that roughly shepherds gods and men, and that law is connected to consciousness and compassion. It seems to me that humans’ idea of God has never stayed still, it is always evolving, as we discover more about the cosmos. We must be prepared to give up our definitions, and follow the discovery wherever it leads.

Of course, you may think it’s strange that my philosophy should be so much about control, and self-knowledge, and self-mastery, when it emerged from an experience beyond my control, beyond my knowledge, beyond my power. Well, such paradoxes are in Greek philosophy too – it emphasises reason and self-mastery, yet its word for happiness is eudaimonia, which literally means ‘having a kindly daemon within’. The daemon within us appears to work hand-in-hand with reason. Perhaps in some ways it is reason, although it also talks to us in dreams and visions. I don’t know where those insights on the mountain came from – but they made sense to my reason long after the white light had faded from my memory. And you don’t need to believe in God to apply them. In that sense, I don’t see science and spiritual experience as enemies, I see them as allies in our exploration of reality.

******

Here are some other links, back on planet Earth:

If you live in the North of England and are interested in community philosophy, the charity SAPERE is looking to train some people in community philosophy facilitation in a course this January. Details here.

This Tuesday in London, Natalie Banner of Kings College London is giving a talk at Pub Psychology on mental illness. Details here.

I chaired an event at the RSA earlier this week, where I met the film-maker Stephen Trombley and one of the RSA’s delightful events people – Mairi Ryan. Mairi told me about a competition the RSA organised for young animators to animate their talks. Here’s one of the winners, animating Susan Cain’s talk on introversion.

Well done Obama. For the Republicans, however, it was a rude collision between faith-based politics and evidence-based politics. A clash, if you will, between the geeks and the bible-bashers. And the geeks (ie Nate Silver) won. Here’s Jon Stewart failing to hide his glee.

I gave a talk today at the British Arts Festivals Association, on philosophy at festivals. Here are the slides.

]]>http://www.philosophyforlife.org/in-the-thrall-of-the-the-mountain-king/feed/3PoW: Make Hay while the rain fallshttp://www.philosophyforlife.org/pow-make-hay-while-the-rain-falls/
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/pow-make-hay-while-the-rain-falls/#commentsFri, 08 Jun 2012 09:04:50 +0000http://www.philosophyforlife.org/?p=2120I’m writing this from the Hay-On-Wye book festival, where the rain is coming down piteously, maintaining a steady rhumba on the roofs of the marquees. There are actually two festivals here – the main one, sponsored by the Telegraph, which is rather blue-rinse; and How The Light Gets In, which is a philosophy festival. The […]

I’m writing this from the Hay-On-Wye book festival, where the rain is coming down piteously, maintaining a steady rhumba on the roofs of the marquees. There are actually two festivals here – the main one, sponsored by the Telegraph, which is rather blue-rinse; and How The Light Gets In, which is a philosophy festival. The main event is huge – a whole mini-city of walkways and pavilions. HTLGI feels more like a village fete, with the speakers and audience all mixed in together.

HTLGI started five years ago, and has done well to establish itself and to get media attention. The Guardian had an editorial this week, suggesting that it showed a ‘new confidence and expansiveness’ in British philosophy, and indicating that philosophy and ethics still had one or two interesting things to say to science. Amen to that. I think the festival could have more audience participation, and younger speakers – the youngest I’ve seen so far is in their mid-40s. I don’t see how you’re really going to have new and edgy ideas from people in the last third of their careers, which is the stage where most thinkers simply churn out the same stuff for bigger advances.

I spoke at the main festival on Tuesday – it was the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken to. I’m sure the majority had never heard of me and turned up on a whim (or because it was one of the few events not sold out in advance). Anyway, it went well, I think – the audience seemed warm and appreciative, except for one fellow who said he’d read the book and decided I was a charlatan! He obviously felt so strongly about this he was willing to come to Hay and sit through my talk just to tell me. The crowd booed him down, but personally I consider him a loyal reader.

The real discovery of the festival for me is Tobias Jones, a 40-something writer who was speaking here yesterday (that’s him on the right). I missed the talk but happened to pick up his book, Utopian Dreams, in the festival bookstore. It’s absolutely brilliant. He goes on a search, with his wife and child, for true alternative communities, and writes six chapters about his time in six religious communities – a Catholic village in Italy where there is no money; a Quaker retirement village, a New Age community in the Alps, and so on.

What makes the book so good is partly his intelligence and ability to weave together journalist accounts of his time in the communities with more philosophical reflection on what sustains and destroys communities. But above all it’s his voice, his sincerity. He’s really searching for community and for a good life, not just doing freaky tourism (which I think is an accusation that could be directed at Jon Ronson) or self-regarding self-parody (which could be directed at Geoff Dyer). Tobias Jones is genuinely searching, not just writing a book. It comes as no surprise to read on the internet that he’s since set up his own commune in the woods of Somerset, where people in crisis can go and stay for free. He finances it from his earnings writing murder-mysteries!

That impresses me – he actually sets up a community, rather than simply preaching community from the safety of the lecture-circuit (as do, say, Jonathan Haidt or Alain de Botton). There’s a giving up of ego there, a willingness to engage with the messy reality of human life.

If a writer puts so much effort into publicity, into marketing, into sales, then they’re probably seeking fame and status rather than real community (I write this to myself – as a person attracted to fame and status). But fame and status are the enemy of community – they turn you into an object to be applauded on the stage, a commodity, a reflection in a mirror, rather than helping you meet other humans and connect with them. De Botton said he wanted to set up the School of Life in the manner of Epicurus’ garden. But is he ever there? Does he make himself available to the people who come there looking for answers? Tobias Jones lives in the same house as the people who come looking for help – he actually pays for them to stay there. That’s making yourself available. That’s serving others.

Reading his book makes me feel a bit immature, to be honest, and makes me question my own values and goals, as a searcher for the good life. Are my own goals, in fact, very conventional and bourgeois: a job I enjoy and for which I get recognition and status, a happy family, a nice home? Should I be giving more of myself, as Jones does? Am I writing about the good life without really taking the risks to find it? But then, another part of me reads Jones’ account of the challenges of running a commune for the emotionally and spiritually broken, and thinks, God, that sounds hard.

Anyway, at the moment my plan is still to develop philosophy courses for the general public in the UK. Not very radical perhaps, but it’s a start. Hopefully I’ll be working with Tim LeBon, the cognitive therapist and philosophical counsellor, to develop a course that combines Positive Psychology with ethics and philosophy. Tim writes here on the need for this balance in this excellent piece.

Talking of Positive Psychology, here’s a piece from two American psychologists criticizing the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme (the resilience-training programme designed by Martin Seligman, the inventor of Positive Psychology). The authors say that the programme evaluation failed to test if it had managed to reduce incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression – which surely was the whole point of it.

I also discussed the rise of Positive Psychology, and the danger of an over-instrumentalised and over-automated attitude to the Good Life, in this long essay in American magazine The New Inquiry.

This piece from the Journal of Mental Health, by two academics from the School of Sociology at University of Nottingham, criticises the happiness / mental health initiatives of Lord Richard Layard. The paper argues:

firstly, that Layard’s approach does little to tackle the structural inequalities within society, which are known to be prime indicators of mental ill health. The second critique is that Layard’s proposals form a misguided attempt to use therapy as a way of compensating for a breakdown in community. The third and related critique is that Layard’s proposals suggest a medicalization of social issues in ways that individualize social problems.

Fair enough. As Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan recently noted, the best predictor of depression is poverty. But are the authors saying that people with depression / anxiety / panic attacks need to wait for the complete overhaul of capitalist society before they can hope to stop having panic attacks? They are, it seems to me, making the inner / outer fallacy – either overcoming mental health problems is entirely an inner process (as perhaps CBT seems to suggest) or it’s entirely an external and social process (as the authors seem to suggest). Surely it’s both – you need to do inner work to strengthen yourself and make your self more autonomous and less prey to each compulsion or fixation, in order that you can engage effectively with society and change it. To challenge society, you need an anchored self. When I was emotionally disturbed, I was a passive victim, stuck in a job I hated, precisely because I couldn’t govern myself. Only when I learnt to govern myself more was I able to begin pushing against the conventions I was stuck in.

Nonetheless, the politics of well-being can certainly become too focused on inner work, ignoring social conditions – like housing for example. Happiness gurus often say ‘money doesn’t make you happy’. Perhaps not – but a nice home surely does? A garden does, doesn’t it? A beautiful view from your bedroom window does, doesn’t it? These are things that money buys. The link between housing and well-being needs to be much more researched, as this article argues – because I think it is, potentially, the really revolutionary part of the politics of well-being.

Ed Milliband has appointed Jon Cruddas MP as his head of policy. Cruddas (that’s him on the left) is a philosopher-MP, who’s very into Aristotle, Thomas Paine, and other thinkers, and who wants to revive a form of Leftist communitarianism. He spoke about the politics of the good life here, and apparently wrote Milliband’s recent speech about the need for a more English sense of national identity, as opposed to Blairite jet-set neo-liberal cosmopolitanism.

Here’s a decent piece in the NY Times’ excellent philosophy blog, on overcoming philosophy’s western bias. Talking of which – do any of you know anything about philosophy in Brazil? I am interested in finding out more, to write a piece on it. It seems to me a country where practical philosophy is really flourishing.

Here’s another piece I did this week, in Wired UK magazine, on why we need to stop automatically pathologising religious or revelatory experiences, and try to find a more pragmatic way of understanding them and helping people to integrate them and find meaning in them.

Finally, I’d like to hear more from you, to hear your stories of whether or how you’ve been helped by philosophy and / or psychotherapy. I’d like to write some of them up, so we can share ideas and strategies for leading good lives. Get in touch if you’d be willing to help with that- your stories can be anonymous or not, as you prefer.

]]>http://www.philosophyforlife.org/pow-make-hay-while-the-rain-falls/feed/3This week’s highlights from philosophy, psychology and the politics of well-beinghttp://www.philosophyforlife.org/this-weeks-highlights-from-philosophy-psychology-and-the-politics-of-well-being/
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/this-weeks-highlights-from-philosophy-psychology-and-the-politics-of-well-being/#respondFri, 18 May 2012 14:57:42 +0000http://www.philosophyforlife.org/?p=1853Earlier this week I went to see a talk by Tony Hsieh, CEO of the billion-dollar shoe company Zappos. I’m not particularly interested in shoes, but Zappos is no ordinary shoe-seller. Hsieh has built a unique corporate culture, which puts a big emphasis on shared values such as positivity and creativity. He’s an evangelist for […]

Earlier this week I went to see a talk by Tony Hsieh, CEO of the billion-dollar shoe company Zappos. I’m not particularly interested in shoes, but Zappos is no ordinary shoe-seller. Hsieh has built a unique corporate culture, which puts a big emphasis on shared values such as positivity and creativity. He’s an evangelist for Positive Psychology and the science of happiness, and sees it as his mission not just to sell shoes but rather to ‘deliver happiness’ to the human race. He travels the world giving talks on the Way of Zappos, and his life-story has even been turned into a comic book.

I suggested, in this blog-post, that Tony has pioneered the corporation as spiritual commune – or what I call the dot.commune. He told us how, at his first start-up, he initially only employed his friends, and they all worked together and even slept together at the office as one big happy family. Then the company got bigger, people who weren’t his friends started working there, and Tony started to hate coming to work.

So when he became CEO of Zappos, Tony decided to concentrate on creating the right culture, so that everyone in the company was joined together by the same values, the same emotions – sort of like at a rave (Tony used to hold raves in his loft). The corporation as tribal ecstatic experience, basically. This is a pretty weird idea, but it’s not unprecedented – it reminds me of Robert Owen’s attempts in the mid-19th century to create ‘happy factories’ where the workers and their families are joined together in work, arts, music and spirituality. It also reminds me somewhat of Quaker corporations like Rowntree’s – the Quakers also tried to create corporations as ‘societies of friends’.

The liberal individualist in me would probably find working at such a company a bit too collectivist and culty. Tony said the key to creating a strong corporate culture is to get rid of the 10% who don’t share its values. But aren’t the awkward 10% the grit in the oyster, as it were, and the sand in the wheels if the company starts going in the wrong direction? The awkward 10% are, hopefully, the ones at Enron who blew the whistle (OK thats enough mixed metaphors).

I’m also not so sure Tony’s model of happiness is as enlightened or unconventional as all that. One of Zappos’ core values is humility, but judging by his comic book, he doesn’t seem that humble a guy: he tells us all his many achievements, setting up his first company at school, getting into Harvard, making $250 million before he’s 30, running a billion-dollar company, having really cool and beautiful friends who organize raves etc. Success has come so easily to him, that he veers into a typical Silicon Vally, TED-utopian, Messiah complex – anything is possible! I can create the universe around my thoughts!

Well, sure, if you’re young, good-looking, come from an affluent and loving family, have been to Harvard, and happen to be a young computer entrepreneur on the West Coast during the 90s dot.com boom, it may seem that the universe is at your beck-and-call. Life isn’t quite so easy for the rest of the world, including for conventional businesses struggling against brash dot.com companies like Zappos, Amazon or Google.

Still, the idea that corporations should care about the well-being of their employees, and provide support, day-care, and learning opportunities, is surely to be welcomed. I just think any values culture – in schools, corporations or elsewhere – needs to build in spaces and opportunities for creative dissent, criticism, and independence. Otherwise they can easily go culty, and go wrong.

Hsieh is a good example, it seems to me, of the TED narrative of superhuman entrepreneurs who can save the world (and make a billion dollars) through their personal creativity, positivity and charisma. It’s the gospel according to Steve Jobs. It’s an ideologically biased narrative – it emphasizes the idea of the individual CEO genius who deserves the mega-profits he or she makes, while ignoring socio-economic and environmental reasons why some people succeed and others fail. In particular, it ignores the fact that highly successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Hsieh tend to go to elite schools and universities like Harvard. It’s interesting, in this respect, that a recent TED talk on inequality was not put onto the TED website, apparently because it was deemed too politically controversial.

This raises a key question in adult education (and TED is very much a form of adult education). Should it promote one particular political or economic ideology? The classic liberal response is: no, it should educate people to think for themselves and make up their own minds rather than drilling them in propaganda. It should be a forum for intelligent conversation and the free exchange of ideas, like an 18th century coffeehouse. But what if some ideas are ruled off-limits right from the get-go? What if some topics are banned in the coffeehouse? As Roger Fieldhouse, the great historian of adult education, writes: “if the discussion is open to the extent only of those ideological stances which are agreed in fundamental assumptions, and therefore conform to the prevailing consensus, the liberal tradition becomes somewhat empty, and merely rhetorical.” Exactly.

On Monday I went to see an interesting new experiment in adult education: The School of Life’s live tour. Six speakers, including Alain de Botton, Roman Krznaric, Philippa Perry and others, gave ten minute talks on everything from How To Stay Sane to How To Think More About Sex. It reminded me of the old Chautauqua movement in the US, where lecturers would tour from town to town, putting up a big tent and educating / entertaining the locals. I gave a talk at the School of Life myself on Tuesday – it was the first workshop / talk I’ve done based on my book, and a good first step in finding a workable format for the teaching of philosophy / CBT (what the hell should I call it…psycho-philosophy? Sounds a bit Patrick Bateman. Experimental ethics? Eudaimonics? That’s what Umair Haque and Owen Flanagan have called their work)

Talking of community eudaimonics, check out this interesting organisation: The Well-Being Project, which is a Community Interest Company (CIC), that supports community well-being in Merseyside for people experiencing ‘mild to moderate mental distress’. It provides CBT courses and also links people up to other types of self-help and community activities, like reading groups, cookery courses, local sports etc. CICs were launched by New Labour in 2005 as a way for social enterprises to register themselves as philanthropic companies without some of the restrictions and onerous reporting requirements of charities (here’s Will Davies of the Young Foundation writing about them). I think CICs could be a good way of running philosophy / adult education organisations in local communities.The Well-Being Project attracted £150,000 in its first year of working, and seems to be doing well. It’s an interesting example of the sort of independent care provider that the government wants to play a much bigger role in local community healthcare.

The government also wants to start a voucher free market for private providers of parenting classes. All parents would get vouchers from Boots that enable them to choose an independent provider of parenting classes. Sounds interesting – though how does the government make sure all these private providers are actually teaching good parenting? Who decides what is good?

The first independent survey for the government’s national citizen service scheme came back with positive results, so the government looks set to expand the scheme so that 90,000 young people a year are given a week of outdoor adventuring then two weeks experience of volunteer work. Critics of the scheme say it’s too expensive, costing £1,300 for three weeks, when Germany spends the same amount funding a whole year of volunteering.

Canada launched its first national mental health strategy, and called for £2.4 billion more to be spent on improving the country’s mental health. Here’s a news clip about it. Looks good.

The Big Lottery Fund has given £25 million to a consortia of youth organisations including The Young Foundation and the Dartington Social Research Unit to work to help 8-14-year olds from deprived backgrounds who are at risk of joining gangs and committing crimes. Radio 4’s All In The Mind show, meanwhile, covered a project to provide psychotherapy to young kids in gangs. It’s called Street Therapy, and is run by a young former pupil of Cheltenham Ladies.

The percentage of adults taking adult education classes is at all-time low in the UK, as companies slash training courses and libraries close. Adult education for working class people has been particularly hit.

This blog made me laugh: what the great philosophers would write if they were forced to teach in modern universities and prove their ‘impact’ via endless REF forms.

Bhutan, the first country in the world to start measuring national happiness and to make it a national policy priority, is suffering from the impact of economic over-heating. The government is worried too many people are leaving their villages to go and live in shanty-towns outside the capital, drawn by the prospect of higher salaries. Meanwhile the new affluent keep on buying foreign cars, driving the cost of fuel up. We need to rediscover our traditional sources of happiness, says the prime minister.

Here’s an interesting profile of Daniel Bem, the controversial social psychologist who claims to have evidence for pre-cognition.

A new study in Science magazine suggests PTSD among US troops is about a quarter as prevalent as the Army thought – only around 5% of deployed troops get it, as opposed to the 20% the Army thought. ‘Are we winning the war against PTSD?’ asks the special edition (behind pay-wall alas). Hope so.

I’ve launched an author page on Facebook, which you can like here. If any of you have now finished my book and enjoyed it, do please write a review on Amazon as media reviewers have showed a glorious lack of interest in it.Finally, in tribute to Donna Summer, who sadly died this week, here is the video for her great song, State of Independence, released 30 years ago, written by Vangelis, produced by Quincy Jones, with Michael Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder and others doing the backing singing. Awesome!